The Finger Points (1931)

Description

A reporter dares to expose the Chicago underworld in this blistering crime drama penned by famed pulse-pounding screen scribes John Monk Saunders (Wings, Dawn Patrol) and W.R. Burnett (Little Caesar). Ripped from the headlines, this pre-Code crime corker delivers the goods in its tale of a small-town boy turned big-city cynical correspondent. Naive young Southern boy Breckenridge Lee (Richard Barthelmess) comes to Chicago to seek his fame and fortune as a newspaperman, and his first story gets his name on a headline, leads the police on a raid and lands him in the hospital. When affable criminal fixer Louis Blanco (Clark Gable) clues the kid in on how to land the gravy over gravel, Lee signs on to be syndicate stooge. While fellow reporters Marcia (Fay Wray) and Breezy (Regis Toomey) worry that the kid is in over his head, Lee makes a play at a powwow with the underworld's Number One -- a sit-down that proves fatal for one member of the fourth estate.